Home

The Morning Download: Why CIOs Care About Office 2013

24.05.13

Good morning. With Office 2013, Microsoft has made it easier for CIOs to maintain the status quo while modernizing their productivity tools. For most CIOs, however, the decision to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2013 will depend largely on the extent to which productivity tools are important to a significant number of end users. Equifax CTO Bryan Garcia, who beta-tested the suite, tells CIO Journal he plans to roll it out to his entire work force, and will implement custom security features using the new Office app store to ensure critical data doesn’t leak out from behind the company’s firewall.

Many CIOs, however, are already considering a switch from Office to “good-enough” Web-based productivity tools, often as a first step to jumping off the Microsoft licensing bandwagon entirely. Moreover, upgrading to Office 2013 may not make sense for organizations where only a limited number of users need the full swath of productivity features — especially since the new suite isn’t compatible with many older versions of Windows, as Tom Warren at the Verge reports .

Source: Wall Street Journal (blog)